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9/27/2010

So this past Sunday this little thing we call The Stirring celebrated 9 years. Here are some photos of me painting live during the service.

Rudy Howard and Ephie Johnson joined The Stirring Band to bring us some Memphis soul music. When those two are singing, I would really like to be doing some big painting where i can get into the groove and start slinging paint some paint. But alas, I think that would be too much of a mess. As it was, I still somehow managed to get paint on my hat (thankfully it washed out).

Adding Chester to the painting.

Like Eli said, The Stirring has been on quite the journey, but it's been a privilege to walk it with all those who love and support The Stirring.

Not exactly sure what the title will be for this one. It's based on this doodle that I called "Ready to Go" and at the time the image was about wanting to get back to the mountains, a place i love and feel at peace. But recently, the image came back to mind and I saw it differently. Now, I see Chester picking up the pieces of his broken heart and moving on. He's determined to get out of this dark valley and back to mountain tops.

9/20/2010

Enjoy some hometown music as Rudy Howard and Ephie Johnson join The Stirring Band. Experience the journey of prayerful art from around the country during a message from Eli Morris. Eat with friends following the service while checking out The Gallery and special music.

See below for more information about the journey of the current art series displayed in The Stirring Art Gallery.

“To Send a Prayer: a Collaborative Journal Project”
at The Stirring Art Gallery

Exhibit description:

Last year, Richard Fudge was planning “To Send a Prayer,” an exhibit that explored the visual metaphor of a prayer being akin to a letter. During the planning, Fudge shared the concept and some of his sketches with a fellow artist in Texas. Inspired by the concept of mailing letters to heaven, Fudge began a collaborative journal project. Artists across the country were invited to participate by signing up to receive a journal and add their own visual expressions of prayer through painting, drawing, and photography. The journals began traveling across the country with artists participating from coast to coast.

Over the past year, the four journals have traveled over 25,000 miles, visited 23 cities and over 40 artists have contributed to the project. For the exhibit, 20 selected pages were enlarged and printed for display.

Featured Artists:

Richard Fudge – Memphis, TN

Deeann C. Rieves – Atlanta, GA

Alberto Cabrera – Memphis, TN

Jennifer Harvey – Germantown, TN

Suzan R. Wallace – Cape Carteret, NC

Mike Carter – Fort Mill, SC

Mary DeCroce – Southington, CT

Chad Michael Irwin – Memphis, TN

Arian Armstrong – Newport, KY

Gail Wilkins – Memphis, TN

Amelia Whaley – Mt. Pleasant, SC

Anneli Anderson – Portland, OR

Charlie Forrester – Memphis, TN

Kathy MacDonald – Memphis, TN

Graeme Parsons – Bartlett, TN

Opening Reception:

Sunday, September 26

5:15 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

Viewers are invited to attend The Stirring worship experience which begins at 5:30 pm. During this special service, Richard Fudge will create original artwork live on stage. Following the service at 6:30 pm, guests can view the exhibit, enjoy refreshments, and enjoy live music.

“To Send a Prayer: a Collaborative Journal Project” will be on display from September 26th to November 7th. The gallery is open 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Sundays. The Stirring Art Gallery also can be viewed during Hope Church’s regular office hours.

Various works by local artists are currently on display at The Stirring Art Gallery, located inside Hope Church. Many of the paintings were created live on stage during The Stirring service. Each month, a different local artist volunteers to paint during the service. The completed painting(s) and several other selected works by the artist are then displayed in the gallery and available for purchase by contacting the artist.

The Stirring meets every Sunday at 5:30 p.m. at Hope Church at 8500 Walnut Grove Rd. in Cordova, Tennessee. For more information, visit www.thestirring.net.

9/09/2010

Every Sunday night in September from 5:30-6:30p, you can watch me paint something live on-stage at the Stirring. Last Sunday, I started this painting. It's two 24"x18" canvases clamped together that I'll separate once it's complete. I've also got quite a few paintings on display up stairs in the Stirring art gallery.

This past weekend was so nice that I finally got started on three To Send a Prayer paintings. It took forever for the canvas and supplies that i ordered to arrive. I hope to make more headway this weekend and complete them in time for a special art show at the end of the month (more on that later). Yep. At the Fudge art studio, we're shifting into high gear.

9/08/2010

Chad is a friend of mine and I thought I'd spread the word about his upcoming art show. Here are the details from the press release:

Patchwork Junk Drawer @ Gallery 210, 1015 S Cooper St.

The other day I was at a friend’s house. He was looking for a corkscrew and couldn’t find it. Fumbling through one drawer he asked another friend to take a look in the junk drawer—pointing to one just down from where he was rummaging. “Junk drawer? That’s an intimate thing!” said the one to the other. Filled with things too precious to discard but neither valued, neither useful nor useless—in some sense like the treasures tucked away by a child in a shoe box and shoved under the bed or buried by a tree in the back yard. They are like souvenirs taken from sojourns as though they were the deepening of childhood memories: sluggishly past traumas, whizzing by the mundane, dawdling in the company of the cherished and monumental, or just pebbles in shoes. Intimate perhaps because we often feel as though we are those junk drawers: cobbled together with miscellany that doesn’t quite seem to fit together, point to anything larger or say anything—anything; just a discarded mess of unattended to questions. Baubles.

Chad Irwin’s "Patchwork Junk Drawer" deals in these baubles. His is the amalgam of dust and detritus all too often discard into drawers like these or tossed to the side of the road or passed by without any thought. There he pauses and contemplates, sifts through the confusion and re-envisions it into art. A bottle cap, denim patch, button and bone become "Coelacanth". The discarded becomes the “discarded, found and re-integrated” just like the prehistoric fish once thought extinct but now rediscovered and highly sought after by museums and collectors.

His medium is just junk: frayed pieces of yarn, buttons, broken shells, rusted nails and cast off on canvases and in frames which look equally regal. It’s a hard sell to a culture so enamored by the pristine, and who already threw this stuff away once before. But where most see irrelevance, Irwin finds a challenge. May be its out of his own brokenness (or may be its in response to the shattered he’s encountered) mingling with an out-and-out dissatisfaction with the status quo that necessitates his humble attempt at mending. That’s why he collects, catalogs and assembles as if he were an archeologist, or anthropologist, but instead of deciphering and piecing back together what was, he attempts to study the discard in order to re-shape it into what could be. His is not about answers rather possibilities. And that is most what a junk drawer represents: the perpetual hope for purpose, usefulness and meaning, but always teetering with apprehension—flirting with irrelevance. That is the challenge in each of his pieces for us. First a confrontation with the garbage, then a reconciliation, or at least, the prospect of one. He obliges his viewer to reconsider value both their own and in general.

"Patchwork Junk Drawer" will be on display at Gallery 210 from September 17th until October 16th 2010. It will feature more than 20 works by local artist and Pennsylvania transplant, Chad M. Irwin. There will be an opening reception Friday, September 17, 6:00-8:00 PM. The exhibit and reception are free and open to the public. General gallery hours are from 9:00 a.m. – Noon, Monday thru Friday and 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Sundays.